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Thoughts on Film Sound DesignFri, 02 Mar 2018 00:44:16 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngrandythombloghttps://randythomblog.wordpress.com
What Would A Movie Be Without Visuals?https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/what-would-a-movie-be-without-visuals/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/what-would-a-movie-be-without-visuals/#respondWed, 14 Jun 2017 15:01:27 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/what-would-a-movie-be-without-visuals/When we talk about the importance of sound in film, someone often says, in an attempt to bolster sound’s case, “What Would A Film Be Without Sound?”

Despite its good intentions I find statements like this to be insulting to sound. In a strange way they legitimize sound’s subordinate status. If you really believe sound should have equal status with the other creative crafts, then asking that question should be considered just as bizarre as asking “What would films be without visuals?”

Anyway, being necessary or even useful doesn’t automatically make it artistically crucial, which is what we’re really talking about. After all, the apparatus in the image pictured here is extremely useful too, but that doesn’t make it artistically important.

Fascinating! One of the questions it suggests to me is: if it’s useful to make sound visible in order to learn more about sound, why does it make any less sense to make light audible in order to learn more about light? The only such experiments that come to mind are the ones in recent years involving turning electromagnetic radiation from outer space into “sound.” But those efforts are too often characterized in the press as if EMR were sound, which of course it isn’t.

I’m always grappling with the ways we perceive light and sound differently, and trying to understand why sound so often gets subordinated. There might be a clue here, in our inclination to assume we can learn about sound via light, but not light via sound.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/1258/feed/1thumb_L1000130_1024randythomDesigning A Movie For Soundhttps://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/designing-a-movie-for-sound/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/designing-a-movie-for-sound/#commentsFri, 05 May 2017 23:13:03 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=1234This is an article I wrote in the mid 1990’s. It’s a plea for sound to be taken as seriously as visuals in film storytelling. Most directors say they care deeply about sound, but almost none of them spend even 10% as much time working on sound as they spend working on the visual aspect of their films. It’s a disconnect I don’t fully understand, but I’m sure it has something to do with the dominance of the visual in our consciousness. The twist, though, is that sound’s impact on us is often subconscious, which makes it an enormously powerful tool in the hand’s of a movie maker. My goal is to help writers and directors figure out how to think analytically about this storytelling arsenal that we resist thinking about: sound.

Designing A Movie For Sound

The biggest myth about composing and sound designing is that they are about creating great sounds. Not true, or at least not true enough.

What is Sound Design? You may assume that it’s about fabricating neat sound effects. But that doesn’t describe very accurately what Ben Burtt and Walter Murch, who first brought the term into the film world, did on “Star Wars” and “Apocalypse Now” respectively. On those films they found themselves working with directors who were not just looking for powerful sound effects to attach to a structure that was already in place. By experimenting with sound, playing with sound (and not just sound effects, but music and dialog as well) all through production and post production what Francis Coppola, Walter Murch, George Lucas, and Ben Burtt found is that sound began to shape the picture as much as the picture shaped the sound. The result was very different from anything we had heard before. The films are legends, and their soundtracks changed forever the way we think about film sound.

What passes for “great sound” in films today is too often merely loud sound. High fidelity recordings of gunshots and explosions, and well fabricated alien creature vocalizations do not constitute great sound design. A well-orchestrated and recorded piece of musical score has minimal value if it hasn’t been integrated into the film as a whole. Giving the actors plenty of things to say in every scene isn’t necessarily doing them, their characters, or the movie a favor. Sound, musical and otherwise, has value when it is part of a continuum, when it changes over time, has dynamics, and resonates with other sound and with other sensory experiences and ideas.

What I propose is that the way for a filmmaker to take advantage of sound is not simply to make it possible to record good sound on the set, or simply to hire a talented sound designer/composer to fabricate sounds, but rather to design the film with sound in mind, to allow sound’s contributions to influence creative decisions in the other crafts. Films as different from “Star Wars” as “Citizen Kane,” “Raging Bull,” “Eraserhead,” “The Elephant Man,” “Never Cry Wolf” and “Once Upon A Time In The West” were thoroughly “sound designed,” though no “sound designer” may have been credited as having worked on them.

Does every film want, or need, to be like Star Wars or Apocalypse Now? Absolutely not. But lots of films could benefit from those models. Sidney Lumet said in an interview that he had been amazed at what Francis Coppola and Walter Murch had been able to accomplish in the mix of “Apocalypse Now.” Well, what was great about that mix began long before anybody got near a dubbing stage. In fact, it began with the script, and with Coppola’s inclination to give the characters in “Apocalypse” the opportunity to listen to the world around them.

Many directors who like to think they appreciate sound still have a pretty narrow idea of the potential for sound in storytelling. The generally accepted view is that it’s useful to have “good” sound in order to enhance the visuals and root the images in a kind of temporal reality. But that isn’t collaboration, it’s slavery. And the product it yields is bound to be less complex and interesting than it would be if sound could somehow be set free to be an active player in the process. Only when each craft influences every other craft does the movie begin to take on a life of it’s own.

A Thing Almost Alive It is a common myth that the time for film makers to think seriously about sound is at the end of the film making process, when the structure of the movie is already in place. After all, how is the composer to know what kind of music to write unless he/she can examine at least a rough assembly of the final product? For some films this approach is adequate. Rarely, it works amazingly well. But doesn’t it seem odd that in this supposedly collaborative medium, music and sound effects rarely have the opportunity to exert any influence on the non-sound crafts? How is the Director supposed to know how to make the film without having a plan for using music? A dramatic film which really works is, in some senses, almost alive, a complex web of elements which are interconnected, almost like living tissues, and which despite their complexity work together to present a more-or-less coherent set of behaviors. It doesn’t make any sense to set up a process in which the role of one craft, sound, is simply to react, to follow, to be pre-empted from giving feedback to the system it is a part of.

The Basic Terrain, As It Is Now Many feature film directors tend to oscillate between two wildly different states of consciousness about sound in their movies. On one hand, they tend to ignore any serious consideration of sound (including music) throughout the planning, shooting, and early editing. Then they suddenly get a temporary dose of religion when they realize that there are holes in the story, weak scenes, and bad edits to disguise. Now they develop enormous and short-lived faith in the power and value of sound to make their movie watchable. Unfortunately it’s usually way too late, and after some vain attempts to stop a hemorrhage with a bandaid, the director’s head drops, and sound cynicism rules again until late in the next project’s post production.

What follows is a list of some of the bleak realities faced by those of us who work in film sound, and some suggestions for improving the situation.

Pre-Production If a script has lots of references in it to specific sounds, we might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that it is a sound-friendly script. But this isn’t necessarily the case. The degree to which sound is eventually able to participate in storytelling will be more determined by the use of time, space, and point of view in the story than by how often the script mentions actual sounds. Most of the great sound sequences in films are “pov” sequences. The photography, the blocking of actors, the production design, art direction, editing, and dialogue have been set up such that we, the audience, are experiencing the action more or less through the point of view of one, or more, of the characters in the sequence. Since what we see and hear is being filtered through their consciousness, what they hear and the way they hear it can give us lots of information about who they are and what they are feeling. Figuring out how to use pov, as well as how to use acoustic space and the element of time, should begin with the writer. Some writers naturally think in these terms, most don’t. And it is almost never taught in film writing courses.

Serious consideration of the way sound will be used in the story is typically left up to the director. Unfortunately, most directors have only the vaguest notions of how to use sound because they haven’t been taught it either. In virtually all film schools sound is taught as if it were simply a tedious and mystifying series of technical operations, a necessary evil on the way to doing the fun stuff.

Production On the set, virtually every aspect of the sound crew’s work is dominated by the needs of the camera crew. The locations for shooting have been chosen by the Director, DP, and Production Designer long before anyone concerned with sound has been hired or brought onboard. The sets are typically built with little or no concern for, or even awareness of, the implications for sound. The lights buzz, the generator truck is parked way too close. The floor or ground could easily be padded to dull the sound of footsteps when feet aren’t in the shot, but there isn’t enough time. The shots are usually composed, blocked, and lit with very little effort toward helping either the location sound crew or the post production crew take advantage of the range of dramatic potential inherent in the situation. In nearly all cases, visual criteria determine which shots will be printed and used. Any moment not containing something visually fascinating is quickly trimmed away.

There is rarely any discussion, for example, of what should be heard rather than seen. If several of our characters are talking in a bar, maybe one of them should be over in a dark corner. We hear his voice, but we don’t see him. He punctuates the few things he says with the sound of a bottle he rolls back and forth on the table in front of him. Finally he puts a note in the bottle and rolls it across the floor of the dark bar. It comes to a stop at the feet of the characters we see. This approach could be played for comedy, drama, or some of both as it might have been in “Once Upon A Time In The West.” Either way, sound is making a contribution. The use of sound will strongly influence the way the scene is set up. Starving the eye will inevitably bring the ear, and therefore the imagination, more into play.

Post Production Finally, in post, sound cautiously creeps out of the closet and attempts meekly to assert itself, usually in the form of a composer and a supervising sound editor. The composer is typically given four or five weeks to produce seventy to ninety minutes of great music. The supervising sound editor is given ten to fifteen weeks to—smooth out the production dialog—spot, record, and edit ADR—and try to wedge a few specific sound effects into sequences that were never designed to use them, being careful to cover every possible option the director might want because there “isn’t any time” for the director to make choices before the mix. Meanwhile, the film is being continuously re-edited. The editor and director, desperately grasping for some way to improve what they have, are meticulously making adjustments, mostly consisting of a few frames, which result in the music, sound effects, and dialog editing departments having to spend a high percentage of the precious time they have left trying to fix all the holes caused by new picture changes.

The dismal environment surrounding the recording of ADR is in some ways symbolic of the secondary role of sound. Everyone acknowledges that production dialog is almost always superior in performance quality to ADR. Most directors and actors despise the process of doing ADR. Everyone goes into ADR sessions assuming that the product will be inferior to what was recorded on the set, except that it will be intelligible, whereas the set recording (in most cases where ADR is needed) was covered with noise and/or is distorted.

This lousy attitude about the possibility of getting anything wonderful out of an ADR session turns, of course, into a self fulfilling prophecy. Essentially no effort is typically put into giving the ADR recording experience the level of excitement, energy, and exploration that characterized the film set when the cameras were rolling. The result is that ADR performances almost always lack the “life” of the original. They’re more-or-less in sync, and they’re intelligible. Why not record ADR on location, in real-world places which will inspire the actors and provide realistic acoustics? That would be taking ADR seriously. Like so many other sound-centered activities in movies, ADR is treated as basically a technical operation, to be gotten past as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Taking Sound Seriously If your reaction to all this is “So, what do you expect, isn’t it a visual medium?” there may be nothing I can say to change your mind. My opinion is that film is definitely not a “visual medium.” I think if you look closely at and listen to a dozen or so of the movies you consider to be great, you will realize how important a role sound plays in many if not most of them. It is even a little misleading to say “a role sound plays” because in fact when a scene is really clicking, the visual and aural elements are working together so well that it is nearly impossible to distinguish them. The suggestions I’m about to make obviously do not apply to all films. There will never be a “formula” for making great movies or great movie sound. Be that as it may……..

Writing For Sound Telling a film story, like telling any kind of story, is about creating connections between characters, places, objects, experiences, and ideas. You try to invent a world which is complex and many layered, like the real world. But unlike most of real life, which tends to be badly written and edited, in a good film a set of themes emerge which embody a clearly identifiable line or arc, which is the story.

It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all others in terms of making the eventual movie as “cinematic” as possible: establishing point of view. The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters, even when that “character” is the camera itself. The writing needs to lay the groundwork for setting up pov before the actors, cameras, microphones, and editors come into play. Each of these can obviously enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain the blueprint.

Let’s say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked. The boy grows up and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the mill. But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead him to go back to the town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find the source of the bad dreams.

The description above doesn’t say anything specific about the possible use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which hold vast potential for sound. First, it will be natural to tell the story more-or-less through the pov of our central character. But that’s not all. A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound. Most importantly, it is a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of sounds which range from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to comforting to ugly to beautiful. The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice, with a range of “emotions” and “moods.” And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety of elements elsewhere in the story. None of this good stuff is likely to happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that allows it to happen.

The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a collaborator. In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world for which the dream is supplying clues. Likewise, the “time border” between the “little boy” period and the “grown-up” period offers us lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two worlds, and his perception of them. Over a transition from one period to the other, one or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis. Maybe as our guy daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a metal shear in the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car taking him back to his home town. Any sound, in itself, only has so much intrinsic appeal or value. On the other hand, when a sound changes over time in response to elements in the larger story, its power and richness grow exponentially.

Opening The Door For Sound, Efficient Dialog Sadly, it is common for a director to come to me with a sequence composed of unambiguous, unmysterious, and uninteresting shots of a location like a steel mill, and then to tell me that this place has to be made sinister and fascinating with sound effects. As icing on the cake, the sequence typically has wall-to-wall dialog which will make it next to impossible to hear any of the sounds I desperately throw at the canvas.

In recent years there has been a trend, which may be in insidious influence of bad television, toward non-stop dialog in films The wise old maxim that it’s better to say it with action than words seems to have lost some ground. Quentin Tarantino has made some excellent films which depend heavily on dialog, but he’s incorporated scenes which use dialog sparsely as well.

There is a phenomenon in movie making that my friends and I sometimes call the “100% theory.” Each department-head on a film, unless otherwise instructed, tends to assume that it is 100% his or her job to make the movie work. The result is often a logjam of uncoordinated visual and aural product, each craft competing for attention, and often adding up to little more than noise unless the director and editor do their jobs extremely well. Dialogue is one of the areas where this inclination toward density is at its worst. On top of production dialog, the trend is to add as much ADR as can be wedged into a scene. Eventually, all the space not occupied by actual words is filled with grunts, groans, and breathing (supposedly in an effort to “keep the character alive”). Finally the track is saved (sometimes) from being a self parody only by the fact that there is so much other sound happening simultaneously that at least some of the added dialog is masked. If your intention is to pack your film with wall-to-wall clever dialog, maybe you should consider doing a play

Characters need to have the opportunity to listen. When a character looks at an object, we the audience are looking at it, more-or-less through his eyes. The way he reacts to seeing the object (or doesn’t react) can give us vital information about who he is and how he fits into this situation. The same is true for hearing. If there are no moments in which our character is allowed to hear the world around him, then the audience is deprived of one important dimension of HIS life.

Picture and Sound as Collaborators Sound effects can make a scene scary and interesting as hell, but they usually need a little help from the visual end of things. For example, we may want to have a strange-sounding machine running off-camera during a scene in order to add tension and atmosphere. If there is at least a brief, fairly close shot of some machine which could be making the sound, it will help me immensely to establish the sound. Over that shot we can feature the sound, placing it firmly in the minds of the audience. Then we never have to see it again, but every time the audience hears it, they will know what it is (even if it is played very low under dialogue), and they will make all the appropriate associations, including a sense of the geography of the place.

The contrast between a sound heard at a distance, and that same sound heard close-up can be a very powerful element. If our guy and an old friend are walking toward the mill, and they hear, from several blocks away, the sounds of the machines filling the neighborhood, there will be a powerful contrast when they arrive at the mill gate. As a former production sound mixer, if a director had ever told me that a scene was to be shot a few blocks away from the mill set in order to establish how powerfully the sounds of the mill hit the surrounding neighborhood, I probably would have gone straight into a coma after kissing his feet. Directors essentially never base their decisions about where to shoot a scene on the need for sound to make a story contribution. Why not?

Art Direction and Sound as Collaborators Let’s say we’re writing a character for a movie we’re making. This guy is out of money, angry, desperate. We need, obviously, to design the place where he lives. Maybe it’s a run-down apartment in the middle of a big city. The way that place looks will tell us (the audience) enormous amounts about who the character is and how he is feeling. And if we take sound into account when we do the visual design then we have the potential for hearing through his ears this terrible place he inhabits. Maybe water and sewage pipes are visible on the ceiling and walls. If we establish one of those pipes in a close-up it will do wonders for the sound designer’s ability to create the sounds of stuff running through and vibrating all the pipes. Without seeing the pipes we can still put “pipe sounds” into the track, but it will be much more difficult to communicate to the audience what those sounds are. One close-up of a pipe, accompanied by grotesque sewage pipe sounds, is all we need to clearly tell the audience how sonically ugly this place is. After that, we only need to hear those sounds and audience will make the connection to the pipes without even having to show them.

It’s wonderful when a movie gives you the sense that you really know the places in it. That each place is alive, has character and moods. A great actor will find ways to use the place in which he finds himself in order to reveal more about the person he plays. We need to hear the sounds that place makes in order to know it. We need to hear the actor’s voice reverberating there. And when he is quiet we need to hear the way that place will be without him.

Starving The Eye, The Usefulness Of Ambiguity Viewers/listeners are pulled into a story mainly because they are led to believe that there are interesting questions to be answered, and that they, the audience, may possess certain insights useful in solving the puzzle. If this is true, then it follows that a crucial element of storytelling is knowing what not to make immediately clear, and then devising techniques that use the camera and microphone to seduce the audience with just enough information to tease them into getting involved. It is as if our job is to hang interesting little question marks in the air surrounding each scene, or to place pieces of cake on the ground that seem to lead somewhere, though not in a straight line. Sound may be the most powerful tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal in terms of its ability to seduce. That’s because “sound,” as the great sound editor Alan Splet once said, “is a heart thing.” We, the audience, interpret sound with our emotions, not our intellect.

Let’s assume we as film makers want to take sound seriously, and that the first issues have already been addressed:

1) The desire exists to tell the story more-or-less through the point of view of one or more of the characters.

2) Locations have been chosen, and sets designed which don’t rule out sound as a player, and in fact, encourage it.

3) There is not non-stop dialog.

Here are some ways to tease the eye, and thereby invite the ear to the party:

The Beauty of Long Lenses and Short Lenses There is something odd about looking through a very long lens or a very short lens. We see things in a way we don’t ordinarily see them. The inference is often that we are looking through someone else’s eyes. In the opening sequence of “The Conversation” we see people in San Franciscoís Union Square through a telephoto lens. The lack of depth of field and other characteristics of that kind of lens puts us into a very subjective space. As a result, we can easily justify hearing sounds which may have very little to do with what we see in the frame, and more to do with the way the person ostensibly looking through that lens FEELS. The way we use such a shot will determine whether that inference is made obvious to the audience, or kept subliminal.

Dutch Angles and Moving Cameras The shot may be from floor level or ceiling level. The frame may be rotated a few degrees off vertical. The camera may be on a track, hand held, or just panning. In any of these cases the effect will be to put the audience in unfamiliar space. The shot will no longer simply be “depicting” the scene. The shot becomes part of the scene. The element of unfamiliar space suddenly swings the door wide-open to sound.

Darkness Around the Edge Of the Frame In many of the great film noir classics the frame was carefully composed with areas of darkness. Though we in the audience may not consciously consider what inhabits those dark splotches, they nevertheless get the point across that the truth, lurking somewhere just outside the frame is too complex to let itself be photographed easily. Don’t forget that the ears are the guardians of sleep. They tell us what we need to know about the darkness, and will gladly supply some clues about what’s going on. Extreme Close-ups and Long Shots Very close shots of peopleís hands, their clothing, etc. will tend to make us feel as though we are experiencing things through the point of view of either the person being photographed or the person whose view of them we are sharing. Extreme long shots are wonderful for sound because they provide an opportunity to hear the fullness or emptiness of a vast landscape. Carroll Ballards films The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf use wide shots and extreme close-ups wonderfully with sound.

Slow Motion Raging Bull and Taxi Driver contain some obvious, and some very subtle uses of slow motion. Some of it is barely perceptible. But it always seems to put us into a dream-space, and tell us that something odd, and not very wholesome, is happening.

Black and White Images Many still photographers feel that black and white images have several artistic advantages over color. Among them, that black and white shots are often less “busy” than color images, and therefore lend themselves more to presenting a coherent feeling. We are surrounded in our everyday lives by color and color images. A black and white image now is clearly “understood” (felt) to be someone’s point of view, not an “objective” presentation of events. In movies, like still photography, painting, fiction, and poetry, the artist tends to be most concerned with communicating feelings rather than “information.” Black and white images have the potential to convey a maximum of feeling without the “clutter” of color.

Whenever we as an audience are put into a visual “space” in which we are encouraged to “feel” rather than “think,” what comes into our ears can inform those feelings and magnify them.

What Do All Of These Visual Approaches Have In Common? They all are ways of withholding information. They muddy the waters a little. When done well, the result will be the following implication: Gee folks, if we could be more explicit about what is going on here we sure would, but it is so damned mysterious that even we, the storytellers, don’t fully understand how amazing it is. Maybe you can help us take it a little farther.” That message is the bait. Dangle it in front of an audience and they won’t be able to resist going for it. in the process of going for it they bring their imaginations and experiences with them, making your story suddenly become their story. success.

We, the film makers, are all sitting around a table in pre-production, brainstorming about how to manufacture the most delectable bait possible, and how to make it seem like it isn’t bait at all. (Aren’t the most interesting stories always told by guys who have to be begged to tell them?) We know that we want to sometimes use the camera to withhold information, to tease, or to put it more bluntly: to seduce. The most compelling method of seduction is inevitably going to involve sound as well.

Ideally, the unconscious dialog in the minds of the audience should be something like: “What I’m seeing isn’t giving me enough information. What I’m hearing is ambiguous, too. But the combination of the two seems to be pointing in the direction of a vaguely familiar container into which I can pour my experience and make something I never before quite imagined.” Isn’t it obvious that the microphone plays just as important a role in setting up this performance as does the camera?

Editing Picture With Sound In Mind One of the many things a film editor does is to get rid of moments in the film in which “nothing” is happening. A desirable objective most of the time, but not always. The editor and director need to be able to figure out when it will be useful to linger on a shot after the dialog is finished, or before it begins. To stay around after the obvious “action” is past, so that we can listen. Of course it helps quite a bit if the scene has been shot with these useful pauses in mind. Into these little pauses sound can creep on it’s stealthy little toes, or its clanking jackboots, to tell us something about where we have been or where we are going.

Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer, uses lots of unconventional techniques. One of them is to spend a certain period of his picture editing time not listening to the sound at all. He watches and edits the visual images without hearing the sync sound which was recorded as those images were photographed. This approach can ironically be a great boon to the use of sound in the movie. If the editor can imagine the sound (musical or otherwise) which might eventually accompany a scene, rather than listen to the rough, dis-continuous, often annoying sync track, then the cutting will be more likely to leave room for those beats in which sound other than dialog will eventually make its contribution.

Sound’s Talents Music, dialogue, and sound effects can each do any of the following jobs, and many more:

At any given moment in a film, sound is likely to be doing several of these things at once.

But sound, if it’s any good, also has a life of its own, beyond these utilitarian functions. And its ability to be good and useful to the story, and powerful, beautiful and alive will be determined by the state of the ocean in which it swims, the film. Try as you may to paste sound onto a predetermined structure, the result will almost always fall short of your hopes. But if you encourage the sounds of the characters, the things, and the places in your film to inform your decisions in all the other film crafts, then your movie may just grow to have a voice beyond anything you might have dreamed.

So, what does a sound designer do? It was the dream of Walter Murch and others in the wildly creative early days of American Zoetrope that sound would be taken as seriously as image. They thought that at least some films could use the guidance of someone well-schooled in the art of sound in storytelling to not only create sounds but also to coordinate the use of sound in the film. This someone, they thought, would brainstorm with the director and writer in pre-production to integrate sound into the story on the page. During shooting that person would make sure that the recording and playing-back of sound on the set was given the important status it deserves, and not treated as a low-priority, which is always the temptation in the heat of trying to make the daily quota of shots. In post production that person would continue the fabrication and collection of sounds begun in pre-production, and would work with other sound professionals (composers, editors, mixers), and the Director and Editor to give the film’s soundtrack a coherent and well coordinated feeling.

This dream has been a difficult one to realize, and in fact has made little headway since the early 1970s. The term sound designer has come to be associated simply with using specialized equipment to make “special” sound effects. On “THX-1138” and “The Conversation” Walter Murch was the Sound Designer in the fullest sense of the word. The fact hat he was also a Picture Editor on “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now” put him in a position to shape those films in ways that allowed them to use sound in an organic and powerful way. No other sound designers on major American films have had that kind of opportunity.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/designing-a-movie-for-sound/feed/4thumb_L1000004_1024randythomThe Connoisseur of Mistakes… A Craftsman Knows How To Avoid Accidents. An Artist Knows How To Use Them.https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/the-connoisseur-of-mistakes-a-craftsman-knows-how-to-avoid-accidents-an-artist-knows-how-to-use-them/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/the-connoisseur-of-mistakes-a-craftsman-knows-how-to-avoid-accidents-an-artist-knows-how-to-use-them/#commentsSat, 08 Apr 2017 03:23:22 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=1145Most non artists think that a work of art begins with an imaginary grand design, which is then made real by using the techniques the artist has developed. That’s not the way it usually happens. It’s certainly not the way interesting art usually happens. In the beginning there is most often nothing, and nothing, and nothing for hours and days, and sometimes weeks and months. There are scores or hundreds of false starts. Then, when something does pop into the artist’s head it isn’t anything close to a grand design. It’s usually an inkling, a notion, a fleeting feeling. It’s an unintentional smear in one corner of the same canvas the painter has been fruitlessly fiddling with all along. But it suggests something. It’s a start, only an idea, a hunch, but nevertheless something concrete to work with.

People think that doing sound for animated films or for live action sequences that are mostly computer graphics must be especially challenging because it involves “inventing” a sonic world. Not really. For one thing it isn’t accurate to say we “invent” anything. We discover, and the distinction between inventing and discovering is very important. To “invent” or “create” implies something comes from nothing. In fact, what we do is to borrow or steal, and then when we’re lucky we find a way to use the stolen goods in a new combination, a new way. For example, there is no doubt that Picasso appropriated images in African art for some of his most famous paintings. (http://www.pablopicasso.org/africanperiod.jsp)

So, if “creating” is really about discovering something that is already there in a different or scattered form, then how best to do this discovering? You have to become a connoisseur of mistakes, accidents, and the unintentional. Very few people in human history have been so lucky and/or so brilliant that they actually invented anything. Even Einstein, coincidentally peaking about the same time as Picasso, borrowed from the work of many others as he developed his theories, but it was an “accidental” image of someone falling through air and not being able to feel his own weight that was probably the key to developing his theory of general relativity.

At the start of a project I learn as much as I can about what the director and writer have in mind in terms of the story, the characters, and places (they usually haven’t thought much at all about sound), and then I start randomly listening. I listen to sounds in the library and on the street, randomly. As I do it I’m not thinking “I need the sound of thunder,” I’m just skipping around from category to category listening to whatever pops up. Most of it won’t suggest any connection to the project I’m working on, but it usually only takes a few minutes of random listening until I stumble upon a sound that feels deeply connected to the project, and often it’s connected in a way I would never have anticipated if I had just started making a list of what kinds of sounds I thought the project needed. When I’m going about my daily life during the project I try to be open to the same kinds of obliquely but profoundly related sounds. Sometimes it isn’t the spectral content of the sound at all, but a certain rhythm or a certain loudness dynamic.

In “The Right Stuff,” when Yeager’s rocket accelerates, the high pitched sound is a piece of chalk squeaking on a slate board. I had gone to the old school to record doors, but happened to hear a brief chalk squeak across the hall, and it occurred to me that several of those cut together could express the scary intensity of that rocket, like it was on the edge of exploding, screaming through the air.

I try to train my ear to get better at these things, to begin with as few assumptions as possible, and to be open to the unanticipated sounds rolling past me that glue the story together better than any grand design I could have dreamed up.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/the-connoisseur-of-mistakes-a-craftsman-knows-how-to-avoid-accidents-an-artist-knows-how-to-use-them/feed/3imagerandythomThe Tyranny Of Reverbhttps://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/the-tyranny-of-reverb/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/the-tyranny-of-reverb/#commentsThu, 23 Mar 2017 03:33:33 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=1071In the almost forty years I’ve been mixing films I’ve seen and heard and tried all kinds of approaches to processing sounds. As I’ve said elsewhere, including my little piece on “Tools,” it’s been my impression that the longer one mixes, the less processing one does. When you’re young and infatuated with the tech tools, they seem to call out to you and beg you to give them a shot.

Mixers, especially dialog mixers but not only dialog mixers, often get themselves into trouble with clients by using two kinds of processing a bit too much: reverb and noise reduction. I’ll save noise reduction for another day. Let’s talk about reverb.

Obviously, sound bounces around. In almost every place in the known universe whenever a sound moves through air, or any other medium, it also gets reflected by all kinds of objects and surfaces. It’s natural. So, when a mixer is trying to fit an ADR line as seamlessly as possible into a sequence where noisy, reveberant production dialog precedes and follows that ADR line, the inclination is to add a bit of reverb to the line which mimics as closely as possible that of the production material. The problem is… it’s extremely difficult to match the production reverb exactly. Actually, it’s impossible. I’ve never heard it done perfectly (the good news is that perfection isn’t necessary). Falling short of the ideal match makes the mixer feel like a failure to some degree, so he/she vows silently to at least make sure it’s clear that an effort has been made to do that match. The result is very often too much reverb, at least according to the director or the picture editor, and once either of them has made the comment the other will usually agree.

The same thing happens with adding reverb to foley and hard effects, but in general the more “realistic” and less stylized a sound is supposed to be, the less artificial reverb will be tolerated by the typical director or editor. At one end of the spectrum is a straightforward dialog line (very little reverb tolerated), and at the other end would be something like an off-screen magical aura sound (quite a bit of reverb tolerated).

I think another natural tendency of ours also drives us to over-reverb: humans are innately fascinated by reverb. It’s why so few of us can resist blowing our car horns when we drive through a tunnel. It’s why the voices of the clergy seem all the more holy in the echo-y environment of a typical place of worship. Maybe it comes from our distant ancestors (maybe not so distant in my case ) inhabiting caves. We associate reverberation with seductive mystery, and it makes us mixers feel the power of a shaman to call forth that mystery, that transcendence. To quote my good friend Gary Summers: “Why is the past always so echo-y?”

In any case, we can rarely resist sprinkling reverb here and there, and it tends to get us into trouble. In all the years I’ve worked in movies I’ve rarely heard a client ask for MORE reverb… sometimes a different kind of reverb… but not more reverb. But I’ve heard many, many, many ask for less reverb. There has been a bit of an aesthetic trend away from reverb in the last decade or so among many directors. More and more of them seem to feel that any overt use of it is a cliché. Maybe the pendulum will swing back, but for now my advice is to get your kicks honking your horn in tunnels rather than dubbing stages.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/the-tyranny-of-reverb/feed/5thumb_L1000336_1024randythomThe Opposite of Complaininghttps://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/the-opposite-of-complaining/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/the-opposite-of-complaining/#commentsTue, 23 Aug 2016 23:55:27 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=1039Sound people complain, and we should complain because of our low status in storytelling relative to the importance of our contribution. But progress gets made. Larry Blake reminded me a few days ago about Murray Spivack, a mixer whose films won 11 Academy Awards for sound, but he only got two of them. Murray mixed from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, and before the 60’s the Sound Oscar went not to the people who actually did the sound work but instead to the bureaucrats who ran the sound departments at the big studios. I guess the idea was that sound was a communal effort. Of course the visuals were a communal effort too, but you can bet that the cinematographer, not the head of the camera department at the studio, was always the one up there on the stage to accept the statuette. Sound editors didn’t get Oscars on a regular basis until the 1980’s.

Though the budgets continue to get smaller, and schedules shorter, there are other reasons to be optimistic. One is the Sundance Institute’s annual Music and Sound Design Lab at Skywalker Sound. Young filmmakers are introduced to the idea that the time to begin thinking seriously about the sound in their movies is in pre-production, and I can testify that it’s a joy to see that light bulb flashing on in their heads. Nothing to complain about there.

Most great sound design sequences have stylized visuals, sparse dialog, and sparse music. It never ceases to amaze me how many directors think great sound means shoehorning as much dialog, music, and sound effects as possible into every shot, with the only “stylized” aspect of the visuals being shots that don’t last for more than a few frames.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/sound-design-heaven/feed/7Sound Design Heaven VennrandythomimageScore or Symphony, The Moment or The Flow?https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/score-or-symphony-the-moment-or-the-flow/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/score-or-symphony-the-moment-or-the-flow/#commentsWed, 09 Mar 2016 18:18:30 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=131A sound designer writing about music is taking a risk. I sing a bit, but I’m not a professional musician, unless you define music in the broadest possible terms. I fabricate and arrange sounds for a living. I’m sometimes concerned with creating a certain rhythm for those sounds, a harmonic structure, a set of loudness and pitch dynamics; but not at all in the way that most composers are concerned with those things. Many wonderful composers have scored films I’ve worked on, and I’ve collaborated with some of them by working together to figure out how the sound design and music can play nicely “in concert,” though not as often or as much as I would have liked.

Quite a few film composers would rather be writing symphonies than film scores. Some of them do everything in their power to structure their film scores as if they were symphonies… in several movements, hoping that as a whole the score will play as a journey when you listen to it while watching the movie. Film score enthusiasts try to listen to scores that way; but nobody else does. Sound design enthusiasts try to pay attention to the flow of sound effects in a movie, but nobody else does.

My theory is that film scores and film sound design say crucial things to us in short packets throughout the film rather than as a continuous stream. They tell us something about a character in this moment, a place in another moment, they connect two widely spaced moments by repeating a theme or a variation on a theme. Fifty years ago it was common for only about half of a film, or less, to have any music at all; and the same for all but minimal sound effects. These days what is most common, at least in big budget films made in the USA, is more or less continuous music and continuous “sound design.”

The main reason I’m touching on these ideas in this blog is that I think the urge toward creating and maintaining a continuous “flow” of music and sound design in a film is mostly misguided. It doesn’t make a track more powerful; it often makes it weaker. How a piece of music or sound design begins and ends is an important statement, the potential for which is lost, or partially lost, when there are no beginnings and ends, just “flow.” The film audience, in my opinion, is not aware of the flow, and is minimally affected by the flow. They are affected by moments, by which I mean short sequences of sounds, and their relationship to other short sequences of sounds nearby or in other parts of the film.

You might wonder what difference this distinction makes. Quite a big one actually. The “flow” approach is very problematic because it means the “flow” of music or sound design should not be masked or interrupted. That means one of them has to “win” and one has to “lose” in each moment, because if the flow of music is obscured by a bit of sound design then the music is “lost” for that moment, and visa versa. If you believe in the “flow” approach then you set up a zero sum game between music, sound design, and dialog. On the other hand, if your philosophy is that the flow is not particularly important then the fact that one sound element dominates in one moment and another in the next is exactly the way it should be.

I’m very interested in hearing from readers about these ideas, especially readers who come at it from a musical perspective.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/score-or-symphony-the-moment-or-the-flow/feed/8imagerandythomToolshttps://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/tools/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/tools/#commentsSat, 05 Mar 2016 20:58:43 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=121In the early years of work we are obsessed, so obsessed with tools that they become the focus of our attention. The desire to acquire the best tools, to master them and use them drives us forward. So much so that we over use them. We over process sounds in order to make them “ours.” We pan too many sounds, use too much artificial reverb, remove so much of the noise that we take the life out of what isn’t noise.

It’s interesting, I think, that twenty or thirty years into our careers our obsession with tools has usually waned, especially those of us lucky enough to have become somewhat successful. We use fewer tools. We spend much less time thinking about them. No doubt part of the reason is that we eventually have assistants who can do our tool obsessing for us. But I think that’s a minor reason.

The major reason is that our ears have learned to serve us better. Instead of being intent on controlling everything with our gadgets we get better at knowing what needs and doesn’t need to be manipulated. Maybe even more important, we get better at hearing the sounds coming from behind us. I’m not talking about the surrounds. I mean our clients, our collaborators. We hear more clearly what they say, and sense better what they don’t say but nevertheless feel, and want.

The ear is a tool worthy of obsession at every point in our careers.

]]>https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/tools/feed/4imagerandythomWhy Is Sound Important?https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/why-is-sound-important/
https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/why-is-sound-important/#commentsMon, 29 Feb 2016 23:36:07 +0000http://randythomblog.wordpress.com/?p=96Very often when I’m complaining about the lowly position of sound in the film universe someone will agree by saying something like “Absolutely……. what would they do without sound? Try looking at the movie without any sound and see how you like it… ”

When I hear that sort of comment I always agree, of course, but I also think… Man, the bar is pretty damn low. It’s like saying to a cinematographer “Visuals are important in a film because without visuals you wouldn’t see anything.”

Yes, it’s important to “have sound,” but that is rarely an issue. Even skinflint producers understand the importance of “having sound.” The real question is WHAT sound there will be, and even more important: Will sound ideas and themes be allowed to influence creative decisions in the other crafts as full collaborators?

Sound is important because it can tell us about character, place, and time. It’s important because it informs us and moves us in ways visuals can’t, and because certain combinations of sound and visuals can evoke what neither can do alone. It’s also potentially important because it can help to determine what we see. But why be shy?…. Visuals are sometimes important because they help to determine what we HEAR.